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Sensory Overload (feat. Luxury Elite)

from Neon Beige by 회사AUTO

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lyrics

I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie.

"Muzak" didn't start out meaning elevator music: like Kleenex and Xerox, it's a trademarked brand that became slang for a generic feature of our lives.

The marketing corporation Mood Media, which owns Muzak, "designs" music for its clients to pipe into their stores.

Muzak has had a bizarre history, appropriately for a company that employs "audio architects" to chart a song's "topology".

Classic Muzak persists for the clients who want it, but most of it is more akin to curated playlists: Krispy Kreme gets 50s diner treatment, Old Navy gets retro and modern pop.

Mood Media has chosen to consolidate Muzak into "sensory" or "neuromarketing" – that is, sensory overload that manipulates your buying habits.

The world isn't just a stage; it's a commercial.

Mood Media has chosen to consolidate Muzak into "sensory" or "neuromarketing" – that is, sensory overload that manipulates your buying habits.

The company custom-designs sounds, sights, and even smells. Muzak pioneered the early possibilities of consumer psychology, finding that with innocuous background music, shoppers lose track of time and report happier experiences.

We live in relentless stream of artifice, and the boundaries have gone from porous to virtually nonexistent. The world isn't just a stage; it's a commercial.

Using old songs and images can make products more attractive, and both advertisers and artists apply them frequently enough. Cyclical episodes of nostalgia are harmless enough on their own, even if they seem more common and quicker than ever.

When these self-referential mash-ups become part of ambient advertising, though, we risk losing our ability to appreciate original music in the first place.

I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they've hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, 'Let's put on a show.' It was retail theatre Muzak's business wasn't really about selling music. It was about selling emotion.

This saturated advertising – which works by constantly retailing us emotions – makes us cynical in self-defense, prone to build walls against the outside world.

We stop feeling...

In a worst-case scenario, we grow so accustomed to the Muzak that we feel anxious without it.

And we happen to live in this perpetual, all-permeating market, which has plenty of self-evident benefits. But Muzak's reinvention should warn us that advertising sells to us even when we don't notice it, and that it changes us, too. If we want to fend off numbness and keep the little things sacred, maybe the best thing would be to listen to, and not just hear, what's playing in the background.

credits

from Neon Beige, released August 26, 2014

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all rights reserved

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